In manufacturing facilities at which sheet material, such as sheets of glass which are referred to as “lites,” typically, after manufacturer, individual objects of sheet material are stacked for and may be packaged for transport to a storage facility such as a warehouse, to a customer or the like. Palletizer systems have been developed to facilitate the stacking. Generally, individual objects of the sheet material are provided to a palletizer system by, for example, a conveyor arrangement, which conveys the individual objects to a location from which the palletizer system can grip them. After the palletizer system, or, more specifically, a gripper module mounted on the palletizer system, has gripped a object, it will remove it from the conveyor arrangement and transport it to a rack on which the object is to be stacked. After the palletizer system has moved the object of sheet material to the rack, it will release the object onto the rack, allowing it to be stacked with other objects. After the rack is full, or after a predetermined number of objects have been stacked on the rack, the rack may be removed and replaced with another rack. After the rack has been removed, the stack thereon may be moved to a warehouse for packaging and/or storage, packaged and shipped to a customer, or for other reasons as will be apparent to those skilled in the art.
Several problems arise in connection with palletizer systems such as those described above. In particular, generally, palletizer systems currently require that the conveyors bring a object of sheet material to a stop before they can grip the object and move it to the rack. In addition, typically palletizer systems can only grip a single object of sheet material at a time, which can limit the rate at which the objects can be stacked. Furthermore, typically palletizer systems can only be used to rack objects of limited dimensions and configurations, and it would be desirable be used to provide a palletizer system that can be readily and easily adapted for use in connection with objects having a wide variety of dimensions.